


they say, love

by zenstrike



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura is Powerful, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, I love Hunk, Keith and Shiro are Siblings, M/M, Manipulation, Not Canon Compliant, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Space Magic and Lion Bonds, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, and, are they really related meh idk shrugs, i love pidge, i love the paladins, it's just very emotional, shrugs at canon, the garrison does bad things i'm sorry, the longest epilogue ever written for something ever that's what this is, there's a vague road trip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-03-26 02:58:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13848642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: The world was the same. They defended the universe and that should have been that.Instead-----The Paladins are separated in peacetime, and Keith seizes an opportunity he should have made for himself.A homecoming in too many steps.





	1. my heart is too big to belong to just one

**Author's Note:**

> gestures wildly at s5 while making distressed whale noises
> 
> I've been working on this for tOO LONG so here you go I'm just gonna try and finish it and you know whatever let's go chapter 1 obvs no longer canon-compliant BUT SUCH IS THE LIFE OF FIC
> 
> This thing is just really emotional, okay? It's just--REALLY EMOTIONAL.

 

_“Let’s assume everything you’re saying is true. Wouldn’t you want to forget? We can give you a start on that. On moving on. You and your family will be looked after, with a little bit of stability introduced into your lives. A little sanity.”_

_“This is my family.”_

_“What?”_

_“I said: this, here, these people—wherever you’re stashing them—they’re my family.”_

_“Is that right?”_

_“They’re everything I have.”_

_“I’m curious how you made that seem like a threat. Is that something you learned from the aliens?”_

_“Maybe.”_

_“In any case, Keith—do you mind if I use your first name?”_

_“I honestly don’t give a fuck.”_

_“Well. Don’t you think the rest of your little family have people they care about? Right here on Earth, where we can look after them all?”_

_“Look—”_

_“Think about it, Keith, before you make an unnecessarily complicated decision.”_

_“Funny. That sounds like a threat.”_

_“Well, kid. Welcome home.”_

 

* * *

 

 

If it quacks like a duck.

 

* * *

 

 

Home these days is a one-bedroom apartment in a bustling metropolis that’s too loud all the time, but the noise of the road below and his always-arguing-or-laughing neighbours is more than enough to ground Keith when he wakes up in the morning or the afternoon or the middle of the night. He tried living somewhere quiet again, somewhere dry and softly windy and isolated, but the regular visits from his regularly sunburnt keeper had made that self-imposed isolation useless. And the quiet—he had wanted it at first. In a way it felt like a clue for the others (scattered bread crumbs) but weeks stretched into months. It was harder to remember where he was when he woke up in silence. Before that there was a long month with Shiro, watching him adjust to a new prosthetic and a new life and both of them listening to the other not sleeping. Keith isn’t proud of the way he crept away in the night, or the way the Garrison set its weight on Shiro when their panicked keeper couldn’t find Keith. He went back (snuck back) later, hoping to find just a hint of his brother, and found the little house they had picked together empty. He isn’t brave enough, yet, to ask his overworked keeper to find his brother. He isn’t sure she would help him.

So, here he is.

This worn apartment is a sore sight for his keeper. He keeps it deliberately untidy so she deliberately hurries through their check-ins. He doesn’t ask about the others anymore so their ‘talks’ don’t dissolve into shouting matches (Clarissa doesn’t yell, but Keith--) anymore. Keith’s revenge is insisting his landlord charge him triple the original rent, and the occasional envelope snuck to save someone else in the creaky building a month’s rent. Clarissa doesn’t mention it. Her petty response is to refill the holes in his bank account.

Clarissa suggested, once, that he think about a job. School. Starting a family. Settling. Keith wishes he had laughed her away. Instead, he had stared until Clarissa patted his hand and asked if he was sleeping.

Then he had laughed.

“Congratulations, Keith,” Clarissa coos as she opens the door, bustling in before he can slam it in her face. “You’ve been home for a year. How do you feel?” She makes her way to what he elegantly calls his eating table and drops her bag onto it with a heavy thump.

“Guess,” Keith mutters, distracted by the papers he sees sticking out of the top of the bag.

Clarissa is already poking at her tablet, squinting at the screen. “Some of the usual business to start. A little signing. A little blood—I kid. That’s next week, unfortunately, but for a good cause.”

“Science?” Keith closes the door, finally, with force. He doesn’t remember ever willingly _donating_ his body to the Garrison but that’s the way the cookie has crumbled.

Clarissa looks up at him, just for a moment, and the bubble of a smile she usually forces on him is gone.

Clarissa Jones, Keith’s half-assed research suggests, was one of the Garrison’s first space-faring pilots, making it all the way to Saturn and back. At fifty-two, she stands steady despite a persistent limp. Her hair is beginning to gray where it puffs around her face. Keith knows she was assigned to him for a reason. He sometimes dreams of her holding him down and choking the life out of him with one hand. The nightmare clings when he wakes because he knows—just _knows_ , as one does after spending years fighting an impossible war—that this nightmare isn’t far enough from reality. Keith thinks he might have been Clarissa, one day, if he hadn’t dropped out or fled into space in a lion.

Keith looks away first and sits at the table. He holds out a hand expectantly and a moment later Clarissa gives him the tablet. He swipes through and signs a cascade of forms, flinching occasionally at the bright white of them, and Clarissa talks.

“I’ll have to come back in six months and make you sign all the annual keeper forms, but you knew that. Comes with unnecessary changes.”

“But I knew that.”

She laughs. Keith skims the latest confidentiality agreement. The latest refresh changes nothing. He imagines some poor recruit turned lawyer trying to figure out how to say: _say nothing about the giant robot or the lions or the alien princess or the PTSD._ Keith signs with a thumbprint.

“I don’t want you to worry, Keith. There’s nothing but good things in your report this time. My guess is that in five years, at most, you’ll be on your own and free as a bird. Grounded, but I bet you’ve seen enough up there for a lifetime.”

Keith reads over said report. He reads his name, watches it be replaced by cool pronouns and “Patient 04.” He doesn’t feel patient. He gets a page through and signs it.

“You’ve been showing an exceptional level of adjustment. It’s not what we expected. We’re all so proud of you, Keith. Proud of all of you, really.”

He’s in the middle of reading a summary of someone’s account of their homecoming, of acknowledging that they’re all choosing to forget the week they spent in quarantine (under arrest), and he pauses. “Yeah?” he prompts, carefully, slowly, as casually as he’s ever been able to be.

“Finish signing.”

He does, rushing through the last of the forms, and all but throws the tablet back across the table at her. For a moment, all they do is watch one another. Keith feels so still, so stuck, he isn’t sure he’s breathing. Clarissa’s lips twitch, her one knee bounces where it’s crossed over the other. Finally, she reaches for her bag and tugs it close.

“I know you don’t like me,” she starts.

“I hate you,” he all but spits. The venom in his voice rattles his teeth.

Clarissa pauses and pulls her hand away and turns her gaze back on him. He wants to take it back, immediately, painfully.

He looks down at his hands and squeezes his knees.

“I’ve read the transcripts from your early interviews, Keith,” she continues.

He imagines running down the street, his boots slapping against pavement.

“I know what the others mean to you. They’re your friends. Your family, even beyond your brother.”

He thinks of the castle, of the silence of space. He imagines himself on the bridge, the cacophony they could summon when boxed together and feeling bright and high and hopeful.

“I also know how difficult a transition this has been for you. You believed you were something more out there. Now you’re back, and you’re human.”

Not entirely, but enough. His bayard in his hand and his friends in his ears and the warmth of the lions in all of them—

“I have a present for you. I thought it might help you to have a little piece of them. I can’t give you details, but I can give you something.”

Keith looks up. He already wants more than she’s offering. He’s already aching for whatever she’s offering, for just a piece of home. Just a flash to remind him it wasn’t all a dream—because the scars alone aren’t enough anymore. His eyes dart towards the bag and he is unconsciously reaching for it when Clarissa pulls it into her lap. She drapes her long hands over it, bending the paper sticking out. Something stammers in Keith’s chest. Maybe his heart.

“You’re angry,” Clarissa observes mildly. She’s frowning as she studies him. Keith struggles not to squirm and fails. “It’s understandable. _I_ understand, Keith. But you still have work to do.” She pats the bag and Keith wants to scream. “Take this as incentive. I’ll come by again tomorrow, and hopefully you’ll get to enjoy this little homecoming present.”

“What?” he says. He’s cold all over as he watches her stand. His thoughts swirl.

“Tomorrow,” she says, soft. She picks up the tablet and heaves the bag onto her shoulder. It might be a show of its weight, just to tease or torture him. It works.

“Clarissa,” he tries.

“Come. Show me out.”

A miracle: he does. He watches her make her swift way down the hall. He closes his door, locks it. He listens, only for a moment, to the voice in his head that whispers: _you’re stronger than them, better than this—you can fight, you can run_. He forces himself to take several deep breaths and then he slides to the floor with his back to the door and his legs spread out in front of him and he tries his hardest not to feel a thing.

Eventually, he drags himself to the bathroom and runs the water as hot as it will go. He listens, watches the mirror fog and the ceiling’s damaged paint begin to bubble, then he peels off his clothes. He stands in the shower for a long time, trembling and holding his eyes open. His fingers are pruned, his skin red, and his hair stuck to his face and neck, and then he finally lowers himself to the floor. He hugs his knees and he rests his chin on them and he closes his eyes and he listens.

It’s harder every time. All he gets now is a buzz of something cool along his spine, or an irregular thumping next to his head, or the brush of something soft along his nose. He wants to know if they can feel him, if they know that he’s here and that he’s missing them. He digs his teeth into a knee until the urge to scream has passed. He thinks that Lance would know. Lance would remember him.

By the time he turns off the water and stumbles his way to a towel, Keith almost believes it.

 

* * *

 

 

He is nineteen and they have been fighting for a little over two years when the bond solidifies. Coran has been warning of it—preemptively celebrating it—for ages, and the more he’s heard the more wary of it Keith’s been. He expects noise, a constant headache, a forced breakdown of his ego and shattering of his boundaries: no privacy. He’s afraid, even if it’s supposed to be a symbol of how strong a team they’ve become.

When it comes it is part of the teetering crux of their war. Keith thinks that they are standing at the edge of the end. He can see it.

Several things happen.

It’s like a barrage of sudden colours all over his eyelids, a warmth spreading from his chest to his fingertips. It is nothing like he imagined.

First, there’s Shiro and all the warmth and limitless love that Keith had always known was there. What he didn’t know was how little Shiro felt it from _him_ , how unaware Keith had made his brother, and wordlessly Shiro pulls him into a hug Keith never wants to leave and it overflows, this feeling of family and belonging, ricocheting between them.

And then he sees Lance and maybe it’s like the first time and he marvels at how stupid they’ve been, all the secrets and quiet. Keith doesn’t doubt for a second: _he loves me_ , he thinks; _he knows I—_ Lance’s grin is a silencing force and Shiro’s hand on Keith’s shoulder carries more weight than before. Hunk just says, teary-eyed: “I’m glad that’s out in the open.” None of them talk about it again and Keith thinks that that’s alright. He’s at peace with it. He’s filled, suddenly, with a certainty that everything will be alright. He sees certainty in the face of his exhausted brother, in the grins of his friends, and in the small smile that Lance gives him in those tiny moments when it feels like it’s only them in the universe.

“We have time,” Lance says into his hair later, more a sigh than anything real. Laying in the dark and listening to him breathe, their legs tangled together and the uncomfortable way his shirt bunches against his side—it’s all searing proof to Keith that he isn’t dreaming. He thinks Lance is right.

They have time. Once the future and the end of the war seemed like a wall Keith was terrified of crashing into. Now he sees space stretching before each of them. They have time. They decide in quiet conversation and half-hearted bickering that time is what they’ll wait for. Keith isn’t afraid anymore, and he knows—just _knows_ —that none of the others are either.

When the end comes it’s Allura who finishes it all and none of them thought it would end any other way. Keith, trembling with shock and doing his best just to keep Red moving for both him and Lance doesn’t need Allura to say anything. He feels it: her horror, her despair, her hope, the victory that’s waiting for all of them. Lance drags himself to Keith’s side and the seat they had spent years both arguing over and sharing. He touches Keith’s knee. He makes a sound that’s part laugh and part gasp.

“Well,” Shiro says over the comms when Allura remains silent. “It’s all downhill from here, team.”

When he brings Red to a shaky landing in Blue’s hangar, Lance is already trying to limp away, every thought on the lions rather than the dead emperor they are leaving behind. Not that Keith is much better, because he catches Lance by his broken arm and flinches at the shout of pain Lance makes.

“Sorry, sorry,” Keith mutters while Lance glares at him. It’s all amazing to Keith so he takes Lance’s face between his hands and kisses him with a clumsy ferocity that has them stumbling back against Red’s walls.

“Do that again,” Lance says when Keith pulls back. “Just, you know. Watch the arm.”

“Okay,” Keith replies.

They stay until Red sends an annoyed jolt through both of them and Lance’s laughter dies slowly against Keith’s lips. He’s out a moment later and Keith scrambles after him. Lance flings himself onto one of Blue’s battered paws with a moan of relief when her eyes flash in greeting. Keith smiles and lets him be for a time, then drags both their battered bodies out of the hangar.

Hunk greets them both with a teary hug that makes one of them scream and Hunk launches into apologies. Pidge throws themselves at Allura, who catches them and they cling to each other and Pidge’s laughter is infectious. Shiro crushes Keith to him, and then Pidge, and Lance shies away but Hunk lifts him off his feet. Coran is crying and the mice are dancing and all of it feels like an impending happily ever after. It feels like something they’ve earned together.

Keith eventually falls asleep that night—or whatever passes for night at that point—in Lance’s bed, with Lance breathing over his collarbone, with one of Lance’s legs slung over him. The blankets are spooled around their ankles and Keith closes his eyes and thinks: _here we are_.

The dismantling of the empire isn’t easy or quick but they’ve laid a powerful foundation and the Allura-and-Shiro duo is an incredible force of leadership and brilliance and Keith’s so proud he could burst at any given time. Pieces fall into place. Suddenly, the work isn’t resting entirely on their shoulders and someone thinks of home and it sticks with all of them until Allura gathers them and says with a smile that they’ve earned some “home time.” She knows how much it means that they have a home to return to. Keith wants to offer her his, but he’s sure they already share one right here on this ship, with his friends and his brother. So he stays quiet and holds Lance’s hand while he cries at the impossible notion that they have time and security enough to _go home_.

Off they go.

No-one knows what to expect but Shiro does his best to sound both confident and hopeful, and Pidge’s father does his best to ensure them all that they have nothing short of a hero’s welcome waiting for them. They decide, as a group of hesitant—curious—confident nine, to return to Arizona and give the Galaxy Garrison a chance to understand what they’ve done. They make a plan to return for Coran and Allura once they’ve settled, and the others all have something or someone they want to introduce them to. Even Shiro. Especially Lance. Keith grows increasingly panicked and then—

Lance tangles his fingers in Keith’s hair and whispers that he’s so _freaking excited_ to introduce Keith to his mother.

Hunk describes in exquisite, tempting detail the delight of his older sister’s cooking and promises his nieces will love Keith and all his broodiness.

Pidge—the Holts—plan without him which room he’ll sleep in, which of their favourite places they’ll show him first.

And Shiro—Shiro takes him aside and tells him: “No more shacks in the desert.” He lays out a future and a home for them—just one of a million possibilities just hiding around the corner. Keith imagines his brother sitting with his feet up, a book on his lap and smile on his face and a dog dozing nearby.

It is wonderful.

All the time in the universe.

So they pile into a shuttle and crowd around Pidge as she pilots, and they bicker and they laugh and trepidations fall away to make space for more hope than Keith had thought he was capable of. Shiro’s hand is on his shoulder and Allura’s pulsing in the back of his head, saying her goodbyes and promising their reunion with a steady warmth they all feel. They land in the desert. Garrison patrols are already waiting for them. Lance squeezes his hand.

The anger and the disappointment on his face is Keith’s last glimpse of Lance before the Paladins of Voltron are ripped away from each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title comes from "Easy to Read" by Milk & Bone.


	2. my skin keeps shedding

_“Just take it all from the top, for me. Pretend I don’t know anything. …Takashi? Can you hear me?”_

_“I can.”_

_“Can I get you something?”_

_“What?”_

_“…tell me about your arm.”_

_“I don’t think I will.”_

_“Takashi—”_

_“I’ve said a lot. There are transcripts. Read them, because I’m done repeating myself. If you want to do something for me try letting me see my team.”_

_“The others are doing fine, Takashi. They’re as…cooperative as you are.”_

_“I’m sure.”_

_“Do you think I should be afraid of you, Takashi?”_

_“No. But I think you are.”_

_“Really?”_

_“I don’t know who you are, ma’am.”_

_“I’m Dr. Chitani. Don’t you remember?”_

_“A doctor.”_

_“A psychiatrist.”_

_“Who’s afraid of me.”_

_“So you say. I’ll ask you again: do you think I should be afraid of you?”_

_“You? Okay, maybe. You’re not—Look, it doesn’t matter. We just wanted to come home. Pidge—Katie—she’s still just a kid. And I’m tired. Let us go and we’ll get out of your hair.”_

_“Back to the stars.”_

_“Sure.”_

_“To your—ah, your_ castle-ship _. Where the robot lions are kept.”_

_“If you’ve read the transcripts we shouldn’t need to do this.”_

_“I’ve read the interviews, yes. Yours, and that of the Holts. I’m sure I’ll read the rest soon. Your brother’s, and the other boys— There’s a lot to remember and digest. It’s incredible that all of you made it out of that alive.”_

_“They have names. They saved the universe. Do you understand that? You should learn Hunk and Lance’s names. This is what you’re all missing: we’ve done nothing wrong.”_

_“Just a whole world of good.”_

_“A whole universe’s, doctor.”_

_“Don’t get frustrated, Takashi. I understand that’s what all of you believe.”_

_“For the love—Okay.”_

_“You must be very proud of the others, Takashi.”_

_“Of course I am.”_

_“You led them all on this great journey, selflessly throwing yourselves in harm’s way for the greater good. You encouraged and inspired them, even when you weren’t actively a—what do you call yourselves? Ah, paladins. It’s incredible stuff. You demonstrated some exemplary leadership and lived up to the standards and expectations that stick to your name.”_

_“I think we’re done here.”_

_“Does your influence ever weigh on you? Think about it from the Garrison’s perspective: a handful of children, including your younger brother and the trials of his own adolescence, disappear and then return. All of them call you their leader.”_

_“Did you hear me?”_

_“I want to help you, Takashi.”_

_“Right.”_

_“I imagine that this war of yours, the one you were drafted into without warning or preparation… Well, I imagine such a situation would change a person.”_

_“Go away.”_

_“All I want you to do now is to reflect on your influence. Consider the lives all of you could lead from here on out.”_

_“Be honest with me, doctor: what are you accusing me of?”_

_“What are you afraid of?”_

_“No more games. Just say it.”_

_“Takashi, be honest. What did you all expect?”_

_“Not this.”_

_“Then what?”_

_“Not. This.”_

* * *

 

Keith passes out without dressing or even drying off. He lays across his unmade bed and dreams of suffocating. He wakes with a start, trembling with cold, and drags his goosebumped body back to the shower. He can’t get any hot water but he suffers through it, desperate, until he simply—can’t. The replies he gets are dim. It might all be a figment of his imagination. It’s a fight to remain certain of anything so he sometimes thinks about giving up but Keith is nothing if not stubborn.

He sits at his table, bundled up in a sweater and thick socks and with a mug of bland tea in front of him. He waits for the trembling to stop but every inch of him seems to be vibrating until the very room seems to be shaking. Eventually, the silence is too much so he turns on his television and sets the volume low so that the hum of the T.V. itself drowns out the drone of the newscaster.

The world was the same. The had saved the universe and that should have been that. Instead—

Knocking at his door startles him. He drops the remote and its holo-display vanishes so the plain gleam of it reflects the orange lighting of his apartment. He frowns and stands slowly. He squints out the kitchen window as though the darkness is a better signal for the time than his clock (and maybe it is, if only because darkness is familiar and more trustworthy and if he blinks hard enough he could see the figment of stars in his memory). He feels exposed with his messy hair and comfortable clothes. Clarissa probably planned it this way: another sick power play to keep Keith from getting ideas. A younger Keith might have indulged in a fantasy of seizing the bag, of tearing the _gift_ from her, of demanding his freedom and his family.

He’s not a child anymore. War and separation has that effect: it ages him, hour by hour. So, Keith practices serenity. He mouths what he might say to her to convince her that he’s earned this, earned this sliver of the familiar that might just restore a bit of the person he was.

It isn’t Clarissa at the door.

Keith dreams, sometimes, of Lance laughing and bustling about the kitchen; of Lance’s snores waking both of them up; of Hunk’s smile and Pidge’s cackles, her pleasure when pieces of a puzzle fall into place. When he can’t sleep, he remembers these dreams and sometimes fools himself into thinking they’re pieces of recent memory, into thinking they’re enough to drown out the aching loneliness and the nauseating awareness of his own loss. When the doesn’t work, he closes his eyes and he presses his face against a pillow and tries to remember exactly how it felt to be loved and wanted and needed and _loving_ ; how it felt to fall asleep next to Lance.

Keith dreams, often, of his brother at his door, sheepish and smiling. Shiro holds him and forgives him and Keith promises that he’ll never run again. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Shiro always replies.

Keith wakes up, often, with a hollow pain like leftover sickness, like leftover dreams, like the ghosts of his loved ones.

The woman in front of him shifts from foot to foot. She’s about a head taller than him, dressed in what must be a version of her own comfortable clothes: baggy sweater for a university Keith doesn’t recognize, yoga pants with tiny holes stretched into the knees. She shoves a hand through her already messy hair and gets her fingers caught in a tangle. Keith watches her fight to get her hand free. She looks like she’s been crying: her eyes are red-rimmed and her mouth twitches.

“You’re Keith, right?” she asks when Keith remains silent. She squints down at him.

Keith folds his arms and leans against his doorframe, tilting his chin defiantly.

They glare at each other.

She groans and shifts her grip on a pathetic-looking plastic bag. “Whatever. Of course you are.” She looks Keith over once. “I recognize you. You’re pretty hard to forget.”

“Thanks,” Keith replies, dry. He moves to close the door.

There’s a flash of panic over the woman’s face. “Wait! Look—” They both freeze, and then she groans again. She’s almost hopping from foot to foot.

“ _What_?” Keith snaps. His brain whirs, jamming pieces of thought together. “If Clarissa sent you—” He closes his mouth, uncertain what he would say, or what he wanted the Garrison to hear from him. He’s used to unsteady ground, he tells himself. He can handle this, if only this. His nerves are on fire, his teeth on edge. There was a time when he was nothing but this: anger, aflame. He’s been in a corner for too long and his very bones have been aching for a little power, a little agency.

“She didn’t.” The woman’s free hand twitches at her side. “I don’t really know how to say this, so—so—” Another noise of frustration. “Just pack a bag, okay? And do it quickly. I’ll drive you to the airport and hopefully neither of us spend the rest of our lives in a metal box or something.”

Keith stares.

She stares back. “Are you going to move or what?”

“No.”

So he tries to slam the door in her exhausted face but she throws herself against it, startling them both. Confused tension ripples over Keith’s skin and he feels his face shift into something simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. His fingers twitch. Something in him screams: _here_.

Then she looks at him with enormous, panicked, angry eyes. And it’s like all the frightening moments of projection he’s felt sitting in front of Clarissa come spiraling back, barreling into his chest and making him freeze and making him look at this woman again.

“Don’t you all have some sort of mystical space connection?” she says, and it’s a little too desperate and breathless to sound as mocking as she might want it to be. “Come on, man. Work with me here. My name is Tash, okay? I want—shit, fuck—I’m here to help you.”

“Go away.”

“Okay! Sorry! For real, okay? We fucked up. We fucked up _really, really_ bad. I get that. That irritating friend of yours made sure I figured that out.”

“What?” Keith’s nails scrape against the door. An alarm goes off somewhere down the hall, muted and blaring all at once.

“You like beaches, Keith?” Tash says, each word slow and deliberate. “Feel like a vacation, maybe?” Her voice rises an octave. Slowly, she lifts the plastic bag and hold it out to him. She’s sweating, her dark skin shining in the dim light of the hallway.

Keith takes the bag. He thinks about replying but nothing comes to mind but the too-familiar feeling of silence. This, he remembers, is how everyone else lives—how he had lived pre-Voltron and pre—

“I’ll wait,” Tasha says. “But be quick.” She pushes away from the door.

Keith shuts it. There’s another bag inside the plastic one and inside that—a passport with his face but not his name, and a bundle of printed confirmations for flights he’s never looked at without scrambling to wipe his computer after. Keith looks over his shoulder at the closed door. There’s a swirling mass of something dark in his belly, something angry and violent that he’s had his whole life but that’s regrown over the last year. There’s also a little tingle of hopefulness. He looks at his tiny table, at the dripping tag of his tea. He thinks: stars. He imagines an afterimage of blue light against his eyelids. He drops the bag and rushes to pack his duffel bag, feeling foolish and certain and ashamed and manic.

Tash has taken off her sweater and tied it loosely around her waist when Keith stumbles into the hallway. The front of her shirt is soaked with sweat. She’s shaking. Her smile is forced and twitchy. “Ready to go?” Too loud, too bright.

It’s somehow relieving.

“Yeah,” Keith says.

Tash leads the way.

* * *

 

Keith’s stomach drops when Coran finishes his section of the debriefing. Coran’s voice had been bright, but obviously uncomfortable and it seems to ring now in Keith’s ears—though maybe that is all Keith, all wrapped up in his anxieties and panics. They thrum in his veins. He opens his mouth. Closes it. He crosses his arms to hide the way he suddenly feels like his hands are shaking. It sounds like a threat. No—it sounds like a warning.

“Space magic,” Lance says, his voice hushed and awed. He’s draped over the couch, all long limbs and bright eyes and a smile you can’t help but marvel at, even from across a galaxy. Keith wonders, not for the first time, how he had ever been able to focus back at the Garrison with a guy like this loping around.

“Magic,” he echoes and rolls his eyes for emphasis when Lance leans his head back to look at him. Keith gestures around them. “Does this feel like a fantasy? Or a game?”

A year earlier, Lance would have leapt down his throat. Now, Lance levels a look at Keith that makes him feel both exposed and safe. Lance smiles some more. Keith glares.

“Well,” Coran offers slowly. “If magic can be used to describe something we don’t understand—”

Lance gives him two thumbs up. Keith hates him. Keith loves him. A new wave of panic washes through him.

“How would it be different than what we have now?” Pidge asks. They tap their chin. “We’re already connected when we form Voltron.”

Coran glances at Allura, who is glowering at a non-specific point in the room and deliberately not contributing. She is a sleeping bear just waiting to be poked and all of them know it.

“The notes aren’t exactly coherent,” Coran continues. “But the suggestion seems to be that the connection would be more constant.”

Pidge makes a noise. Keith imagines the wheels in her head spinning at a rate he couldn’t comprehend.

The notes The data. A mission that brought them too close to Haggar and that’s left Lance with a limp he’s been stubbornly trying (and failing) to hide for a week, that had Hunk in a pod for two full, agonizing days. The data’s left them all feeling a little unnerved. It’s serving as a reminder of the paladins before them, and of how little they really know about Voltron, or of the people Zarkon and Haggar were—before.

“We won’t be pursuing this,” Allura says then, more princess (leader) than paladin (soldier). She looks each of them in the eye but stares steadily at Pidge. Pidge stares right back. “Quintessence is dangerous. Do not play with it.”

“It might be nothing,” Shiro cuts in. He sounds wary, and exhausted. His words are sluggish and slow, but his eyes are as bright as they’ve been in months. “It may never happen. Let’s not make a problem where there isn’t one.”

“Would it be a problem?”

They all look at Hunk. He shrugs. “Look, I’m more freaked out by weird space magic than any of you. Haggar is _the scariest_.” He pauses and shrugs again. “But—I don’t know. Would more of a ‘bond’ really be a problem?” He does air quotes with wobbly hands and Keith smiles.

“Go on,” Shiro prompts after a beat of silence.

“It’s like this: we’re _already_ bonded. We’re freaking Voltron, guys. The lions are always in our head-holes and we’ve peeked into each other’s. None of that’s bad, or—anything. It just is. It’s already part of who we are.” Hunk gestured between them all, his fingers tapping against his own chest. “Part of what makes us a team. You know what I mean?”

Pidge is beaming and Hunk grins back when he notices.

“It is different,” Keith hears himself say then, and his own smile has drifted away. “When we form Voltron and when we train—” He breaks off, mouth working on words that wouldn’t come. He frowns down at his feet.

“We’ve decided, haven’t we?” Hunk’s smile has also disappeared. “We all decided to keep fighting and to keep fighting _together_. If there’s a way to make us better or stronger or whatever, shouldn’t we be looking for it?”

“I’m not sure I like the idea of exploiting our…” Shiro makes his own vague gesture at the space between them and they all stare into an empty spot together. Keith thinks he’s the first to look away but when he does he sees Allura staring resolutely at the ceiling and Lance watching her with the smallest of frowns.

“Bond,” Coran supplies.

“Yeah,” Shiro says. “Our bond.”

“Enough,” Allura says and throws her hands into the air. The gesture is becoming familiar to Keith—everyone seems to be learning it, like a barrier or signal to tell the others to stay away. These days, they all use it. “All this is speculation and _dangerous_.”

“Fine,” Pidge snaps. “We’ll just wait. We’ll learn, and then we’ll decide as a team.”

Allura stands perfectly still for a moment. Keith barely breathes.

Barriers, he thinks. There was a time when had been sure that nothing could divide them, this team, but fighting and distance gave each of them the chance to build a wall or ten.

Allura turns on her heel and leaves the room. Shiro heaves a sigh and follows her, saying her name softly. Conversation is dead after that, and Keith watches his friends leave the room one by one. It isn’t until he’s alone, Lance’s thoughtful expression ghosting against his eyelids, that the first glimmer of fear hits him.

No, not fear—understanding. The first glimmer of understanding.

* * *

 

Keith has questions, but his curiosity (his suspicions) are weak next to his awareness of what this could mean. He knows what a trap is, intimately. His instincts tell him to be cautious, to look for opportunities to bolt.

He buckles himself into Tash’s car’s passenger seat and clutches his bag against his middle. He watches Tash’s trembling hands and sweaty forehead and thinks that he’s doing just fine, comparably. She mimes for him to be quiet and he nods. Quiet is something he can manage. She fiddles with the center console and a moment later a soft buzzing joins with the hum of the engine, constant and just enough to make Keith’s teeth feel like they’re vibrating.

“Okay. We’re okay.” Tash lets out a long, shaky breath. She eyes Keith.

He blinks. “Yeah,” he agrees, maybe too late. Tash seems unimpressed but she pulls into the light evening traffic anyways.

“Don’t tell anyone about me,” she says, her words rushed and hushed. “Keep your head low. Just—just don’t get noticed, or Clarissa will have both our hides.”

“Okay,” Keith says.

He can hear, faintly, Tash grind her teeth together. She spits out a string of curses and then melts into anxious silence.

Forty-five minutes before his first flight, Tash pulls into a passenger drop-off point at the airport. Keith already has one hand on the door handle when they roll to a stop. He casts a glance at Tash, who is frowning at the steering wheel. He isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say. Does he thank her? Promise he won’t tell anyone she’s helped him?

“I’m pretty good at running,” he says when nothing better comes to mind.

Tash’s dark eyes lift and meet his in a cold glare. Keith thinks of Clarissa’s nails tapping an incoherent rhythm against his table and of her bright, false smile as it comes and goes.

Tash says, “I’m sorry,” and Keith thinks his heart stops. Something twitches over her face and she looks away again. “Get going.”

So he goes.

He makes his flight, just barely. Nobody questions his passport, his destination, or his haggard look. When the plane takes off, his face finally relaxes into the smile he’s been fighting for an hour. His layover in Washington has him trembling, excited, through the night. He watches everyone who passes him, like anyone might transform into Clarissa herself if he lets his guard down. He doesn’t sleep. He can’t. When his next flight lands in Miami he’s already been away from his apartment for nearly twelve hours. Clarissa will know by now. He hopes she panics. He buys a book and a burger and devours both and, slowly, some of his jitters slip away.

* * *

 

If it quacks like—

* * *

 

It’s a little before noon when his last flight lands. He stands in a line of eager tourists and finishes his book of mediocre travel stories and he sweats and he stares at the bright, creamy white of the tiled floor. He makes up a departure date, presents a hotel booking he has no intention of honoring, and he watches the visa get stamped into his fake passport.

“Enjoy your visit,” says the immigration officer in stilted English. He grimaces at Keith’s fake name.

The rest of the airport is orange and red and hot. Outside is lush and the sky is blue and it’s so, so hot. There’s a while where Keith isn’t sure he can move. He isn’t even sure he’s breathing. He hasn’t slept since—since his apartment and his last bout of dripping disappointment. He closes his eyes and tries to focus, seizing the slim chance before him, but his thoughts are too jumbled and hopeful for anything to be clear.

He could have done this. He knows this. He could have found his way here all on his own. Now, it’s too late for him to turn back. Is this his freedom? He isn’t sure.

He rents a hovercycle. His Spanish is shitty at best and the middle-aged man at the counter only lets him struggle for a moment before they made a fluid switch to English. He gives Keith careful directions and then hands Keith the keys. Everything smells like the ocean—at least Keith think it does, but what does he know?

He drives.

* * *

 

If upon a winter’s night—

Well, Keith is some sort of traveler. Another country is nothing in the grand scheme of his twenty-one years, when those years have included a whole universe Keith only scraped the edges of. He had imagined a pilgrimage to the end of what was known, a journey that would be just him and—

_“I’d be down_ , _” Pidge had told him with their feet propped up on the table._

_Lance had shoved their legs._

_Bickering had ensued._

_“Well,” Hunk had said, thoughtful. “I’ll bring snacks.”_

_“A road trip across the stars, huh?” Pidge had sighed from the headlock Lance had trapped them in. “Sounds majestic.”_

* * *

 

Maybe this isn’t where Keith had started.

It is where he wants to finish.

All he needs is a chance.

* * *

 

Keith drives around for a while, lost. His directions aren’t helping or he’s having trouble understanding his own thoughts, it’s hard for him to tell. He’s waiting for something to fall into place in the recesses of his head-hole, for that missing version of him to reappear and tell him which direction to go. He’s afraid that piece is long, long gone.

It’s late afternoon when he sees it, just a flash of it: bright, blue, and warm. He blinks and the sky is changing colour and the hovercycle has hummed to a stop beneath him. He can hear waves, and voices, and as the world comes slowly back into focus, Keith realizes that he’s shaking. It’s like coming up for air.

Someone is sitting in a tree, clinging simultaneously to the branches and a bright but battered comic book. Curly brown hair bounces when the child tilts their head at Keith. “Who’re you?” they ask. They squint at him. “Are you the new Tash?”

“No,” Keith says. He pulls himself into motion. He stumbles off the hovercycle.

“Then what are you doing here?” They deliberately drop the comic and start scrambling down the tree—

But Keith is halfway to the door already. His heart is pounding, his breathing is shallow and difficult. Had he been counting days? Had he made enough wishes on the stars he barely sees? His shirt sticks to his skin, his hair feels wild and ragged and greasy. HE doesn’t so much knock as hit the door.

He feels it. He feels it. He feels it.

His chest is about to explode. He’s about to crumble.

Several things happen at once.

It’s blue against his eyelids, dark as it’s ever been and so close to black—

It’s blue, like the sky on the sea or anything, anything—

The door opens and there’s a woman with Lance’s eyes and Lance’s frown. A young man hovers behind her, all concern and disturbing familiarity.

“Can we help you?” says the woman at the same time the young man says: “Are you here for my brother?”

A dog barks within.

Beyond them, standing perfectly still with dripping hair and wide eyes, is Lance. Properly, truly, Lance.

Everything aches in Keith. His faces flushes hot, warm. His skin is vibrating.

“Keith,” Lance says while Keith pushes his way through the doorway. Lance catches him at the exact moment that Keith becomes certain that he’s going to fall, and just keep falling. They crumple together and Lance is whispering in his ear but all Keith can hear sit he broken sound of his own sobs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title comes from Arcade Fire's Put Your Money on Me AKA the Klance anthem (sorry).
> 
> idk when the next chapter will be up but i'm procrastiwriting so maybe not that long from now.


	3. wherever you run you see all you leave behind you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reunion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for waiting here's a 12 k chapter

_“Are you tired, Hunk? Would you like to sit?”_

_“You know what’s tiring? Waiting. Oh, and being locked in a room. Like, a stark room. Give me a puzzle or something.”_

_“You don’t need to be afraid, Hunk.”_

_“Oh, oh no. I’m not scared, ma’am. I’m pissed off. Sorry, I thought that was pretty clear.”_

_“Why don’t you sit—”_

_“No, thank you.”_

_“Hunk, do you know what’s happened? Do you know how long you’ve been missing?”_

_“Uh, yeah. You do realize we’re not crazy, right? We’re—”_

_“…Hunk? Can you hear me? Jenkins, can you—”_

_“Shush! Just for a minute. Please.”_

_“Excuse me?”_

_“…what’s going on? I mean, what’s really going on? I think—I think my friends are freaking out. I don’t know if you realize but—Hey, you know my buddy Keith? He’s the angry one. I mean, he’s been angrier but he’s—pretty pissed off right now.”_

_“Hunk—”_

_“But what’s really scary is when Pidge and Lance get angry. A good rule of, you know, life is to keep them happy.”_

_“Are you threatening me?”_

_“No, I’m—where’s Shiro?”_

_“It must be very frightening to be suddenly separated.”_

_“Where is he? I can kind of get a feel for the others but—”_

_“He’s sedated.”_

_“…is he strapped to a table? No, why am I asking—of course he’s strapped to a table.”_

_“Can you tell me about Shiro’s prosthetic?”_

_“Really? No. I cannot do that. I think we’re done here.”_

* * *

 

Keith comes to when the dog starts licking his tear-streaked face. He jerks back so quickly his chair wobbles and he lets out an undignified squawk of surprise. The dog barely notices him batting it away.

A chorus of voices: “ _Sophie_!”

Someone grabs the dog—an impressively fluffy thing with a lolling tongue and big eyes—and tugs it away from Keith. He stares at it, held by its collar by the kid from earlier. The dog— _Sophie_ —stares right back, panting with its mouth so wide it looks like it’s grinning at him. Keith wipes his face, perhaps belatedly.

There’s another bout of loud voices—including Lance’s, he thinks. Keith blinks instead of flinches and tears his eyes away from Sophie’s, gazing around him at all the colour and trying not to hear all the noise. He clears his throat and almost chokes.

“Just _back off_ for, like, five seconds!”

“Lance!”

“ _Lance_.”

“He just had a freak out, Lance—“

The voices move farther away.

“I’m Luis,” says the kid, waving to get Keith’s attention. “This is Sophie.”

The dog pants.

“I’m—Keith,” he manages out, blinking some of the haze out of his eyes.

Luis gives him a bright, wide grin. “Yeah. I know.”

Keith is sitting in a colourful kitchen. Out the window he can see the tree Luis had been sitting in, and even the edge of his rented hovercycle. He can smell something citrusy—cleaning product, or fruit? His head is spinning. All along his clammy skin is a tingling, familiar warmth. It tells him he hadn’t imagined Lance, the smell of him or the feel of him—his hair, dripping, and his eyes, bright and blue—and he isn’t imagining the mangled hollering of his voice now.

Luis’s eyes are just as blue as Lance’s, trained on Keith in a way that reminds him that he’s just met Lance’s youngest sibling. Sophie huffs.

Keith wipes at his face roughly. “It’s okay,” he tells Luis with a nod at Sophie.

Luis hums and releases Sophie. Sophie bounds to Keith again and he keeps her at bay with gentle shoves and pats. She eventually relents and rests her drooling head on Keith’s left knee. Luis takes a seat near Keith—more like he scrambles onto the chair, really, with a series of dramatic huffs and an unnecessary wave of his arms. He seems so much like Lance, a younger Lance, a Lance who tries to bring smiles to every face. Keith watches Luis settle with a pleased sigh. Sophie’s tail wags. The yelling is far away now.

A towering woman comes to the edge of the kitchen. Keith glances behind her, something heavy rising in his throat. Seeing nothing, he looks back at her and she smiles.

“Hello Keith,” she says, and the delicacy in her voice ignites something defensive and automatic in Keith. She hovers. Sophie leaves Keith to lick at the woman’s bare knees. “I’m Isabel. How do you feel?” She steps around Sophie and Keith watches her take a pot from a shelf.

Luis kicks his legs and opens his comic but doesn’t read it.

“Where’s Lance?” Keith says when he finds his voice.

“Outside,” Isabel answers. “Coffee?”

“Lance is having his own freak out,” Luis says, shifting restlessly. On cue, there’s a crashing noise. Luis and Isabel seem unconcerned. Sophie returns to rest her great doggy head on Keith’s thigh. There’s a renewed chorus of bickering voices and Luis snickers.

“I didn’t freak out,” Keith says uselessly and looks at the top of Sophie’s head. He frowns.

“You stopped crying just, like, two minutes ago.”

Keith tries to muster up his best glare. Luis just keeps smiling.

“Go get Lance, Luis,” Isabel says.

Luis throws himself off the chair and whistles. Sophie lifts her head to look at him. “Come on, Sophie. We’ll be right back.”

Sophie licks at Keith’s hand and trudges after Luis. Keith watches them go, then turns to look at Isabel and watches her add a liberal heaping of brown sugar to the pot.

“Your hands are shaking,” he says.

Isabel laughs as she puts away the sugar. She tosses two cinnamon sticks into the pot. There is an untouched coffee maker shoved into one corner of the tidy counter. “Your whole body is shaking,” Isabel counters softly. She sniffs at the coffee and turns from the stove with her hands on her hips. She taps one bare foot and studies Keith. He manages not to look away. He can pick out Luis’s high-pitched voice amongst the renewed shouting.

“Do you know who I am?” Isabel asks. Finally, she takes a seat across the table from Keith.

Self-conscious, he rubs at his face. The skin around his eyes feels swollen and delicate. His hands tremble, his eyelids seem to quiver. “Yeah,” he says.

Isabel traces idle circles on the tabletop. “Did you come looking for him?” Lance’s step-mother asks.

A door bangs open.

Keith blinks. “Yes,” he says.

Isabel sighs.

Lance swings into the kitchen then, all flailing limbs and bright eyes, and then freezes like a stuttering programming glitch. Keith stands, halfway into a step towards Lance when his thoughts—his panic—catch up with him and he wobbles, his foot landing heavily.

Lance is a little darker. His hair is a littler shorter. The curls that had started growing in around the back of his neck and ears have disappeared. He seems huge in the light and the bright colours of the kitchen. His bottom lip is bleeding, but Keith can’t tell if it’s split or if Lance has been chewing at it. He looks good—wonderful, really—and real. He looks, Keith thinks with a renewed jolt of panic, like it’s been a year.

Silence stretches on between them and Keith can feel his heart in his throat, pounding and choking. He feels restless, his muscles coiled and burning. Lance is right there, real and breathing. Keith is afraid to blink. He’s afraid and neither of them is moving. Keith’s thoughts spin. His own hair is short now, too—buzzed sloppily close to his head so the first month it grew back unevenly. There’s the scar on his throat that he isn’t even trying to hide, and his sweat-soaked clothes and swollen, teary face.

But Lance is a warmth around his mounting anxieties and in a moment, just a split-second’s work of second-guessing, Keith feels himself lean into it—his other self, his quiet self, his disembodied self. Lance smiles, finally, and crosses the kitchen in two steps.

“Hey,” Keith croaks out.

“Hey,” Lance echoes, his smile growing. He cups Keith’s face between his hands and studies him. “Are you done crying?”

A long breath of tension finally leaves Keith. “Maybe,” he mutters. “Are you done yelling?”

“No promises.”

“I’d go,” Isabel says from her seat, startling them apart. She’s smiling, her chin resting in one palm. She gestures with her other hand towards the stove. “But I don’t trust either of you with my coffee.”

Luis and Sophie return and Luis all but flies back to his seat. He sits cross-legged and tapping his knees, looking unabashedly up at them. Lance’s hands slide to Keith’s shoulders, lingering, and Keith wonders if Lance is a little afraid, too, that this is a dream, or a trick, or hallucination.

Keith smiles.

“Is Keith going to cry again?” Luis asks, feigning boredom.

“Maybe,” Lance says and pushes Keith, gently, back to a chair. Keith lets him but snatches one of his hands. Just in case.

He can see, or maybe feel, Luis and Isabel watching him. He can also see, or maybe feel, Lance’s growing smile. Lance twists their fingers together.

* * *

 

 _Did you come looking for him_?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes.

* * *

 

Keith tore into the plastic wrapping of their new couch, reveling in the feel of it caught between his fingers and under his nails. It was almost sticky, starchy. It was the best he’d felt (the most he’d felt) in weeks. When he tried to toss the balled up remains of the wrapping behind him, it fluttered open and to the ground uselessly. Keith deflated.

“It looked better in the store,” Shiro admitted behind him. He wasn’t wearing his prosthetic and somehow he seemed bigger. Or, less tied down. They didn’t talk about it.

Keith squinted at the couch, then shrugged and stood. He nudged the discarded plastic with his toe.

Shiro scooped it up and crushed it easily under his arm. Keith followed him into their mostly bare kitchen and together they shoved it into an overflowing box that served as a makeshift recycling bin. (“For now,” Shiro insisted.)

They were thirty-one days into their new life.

They didn’t talk about it.

They talked about painting the fence, and tearing up the carpet in the basement. They praised their dishwasher together and made confused eyes at each other when the news referenced something they didn’t understand. They bickered over what to order for take-out (neither were willing to cook in their unblemished, gleaming kitchen). They didn’t talk about the nightmares that had returned to haunt and torture Shiro, or the pills he slipped under his tongue to help. They didn’t talk about how Keith went for late night runs in the dark instead of sleeping, or talking.

The day they had moved in, Shiro had said: “Maybe this is what growing up together would have felt like.”

“You mean,” Keith had said, harsher than he had wanted to be but he had been too tired to be anything but honest. “If we were real brothers?”

Shiro had just smiled.

They didn’t talk about that.

“Why’d you pick it, then?” Keith asked after they had hovered over the box for too long.

“You should have come and helped me,” Shiro said lightly instead of answering. “You know, out in the real world.”

Keith heard: _If I can do it, you can do it_. A challenge, a criticism—mostly imagined, he knew. _He knew_. He wrestled with himself for a moment—a minute, maybe five—and Shiro watched him as if he knew exactly what was going on in Keith’s head. Maybe he did. Shiro’s easy, honest way of understanding Keith made their relationship what it was, built from the early days of fewer scars.

“Let’s get a dog,” Keith said, reaching for hope.

They looked at each other, then Keith shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. He stared down at his feet. If he was slow and careful enough he could feel the others: far, yes, but constant. They felt like promises under his skin, and like they would slip away if he slipped up, just for a moment.

“Keith,” Shiro said and he had a probing, tired tone that was all too familiar to Keith, and too easy for him to listen to.

He turned away and returned to what would—could—be their living room and threw himself facedown on the couch. He tried to breathe in the new plastic smell of it until his lungs protested and he turned his head, taking a long breath in. He felt rusted and sore, like something vital was leaking out of his pores. His soul, maybe?

His vision cleared suddenly when Shiro crouched by the side of the couch. He looked exhausted. Keith wanted suddenly, desperately, to be his brother—inside and out—someone that Shiro could lean on when he needed to.

“I miss them, too,” Shiro said.

A flurry of something erupted in Keith’s chest, crawled its way up his throat—

He swallowed and felt nothing.

A missed step, a slip-up, and there—like always—was the warm feel of Shiro, like he was holding Keith’s hand, warming and calming.

“It’s just you,” Keith said, and he wasn’t sure if it was an admission or an accusation. Shiro didn’t reply, just watched him. The plush cushions were slowly swallowing Keith. “Pidge would love this couch.”

“I thought that, too.”

 

* * *

 

_Pidge is asleep, sprawled awkwardly on the edge of the couch, their glasses askew and mouth hanging open. Lance has given up trying to wake them up, and is sending Looks at Keith like there’s a joke Keith’s missing._

_“C’mon Pidgelet,” Lance coos._

_“Pidge hates that,” Keith says quietly, but smiles._

_“Definitely asleep then,” Lance announces, and unceremoniously scoops Pidge into his arms. Pidge grunts. “Don’t drool on me!”_

_“Pidge doesn’t sleep enough,” Keith decides._

_They say something rude, or something that sounds rude, and then promptly falls back asleep._

_“Heavy,” Lance grunts, but he’s grinning. As they leave the lounge and begin the slow, alarmingly regular walk towards Pidge’s room, Lance adds softly, just for Keith: “I bet Luis is a lot like Pidge, by now.”_

_Keith opens his mouth and then closes it again when he can’t find anything witty to say._

_Pidge promises violence when they tuck them into bed, but Keith thinks they’re sleeping and doesn’t worry too much. He tucks an arm around Lance’s waist when they’re back in the hall and they hover together. Lance leans, heavy and tired, against him. Keith wants to ask if he and Shiro could have had what Pidge and Lance have, or what Lance and his younger brother have. He wants to promise that the war is ending, soon. All he manages to do is hold on and say: “Tell me about your siblings.”_

_Lance does._

* * *

 

Lance takes a chair and shoves it so close to Keith’s that their knees touch as he sits. He keeps tapping his fingers against the table, and his mouth keeps twitching, and Keith can’t help but stare at the little bit of blood drying on his bottom lip. He wants it to be an intimate fixation, or— _whatever_ , but he knows it’s more of an open door to a very bad spiral.

He drinks the coffee Luis shoves into his hands on Isabel’s behalf. It smells nutty and cinnamon-sweet and leaves a coating that is both soft and heavy on his tongue. Sophie follows Luis as he darts about the kitchen—sometimes aimlessly, sometimes with unnerving purpose—but she pauses occasionally to lick at Lance’s elbows when he lets his guard down.

“Is Keith hungry?” Luis asks Lance.

“Ask Keith,” Lance and Isabel say with varying degrees of exasperation and fondness.

“I’m good,” Keith says before Luis can open his mouth again.

Luis snatches a box from a cupboard anyways and opens it to show off the pastries within with more pride than Keith thinks is really necessary. He pushes it onto the table and gestures meaningfully towards it.

Isabel brings a mug to Lance and studies his face with a frown. Lance just smiles. She shakes her head and pats his shoulder. “I’ll get the others,” she says, then pauses to look at Keith. “If you’re alright with that?”

Keith blinks.

“He’s good,” Lance says for him.

“I’m good,” Keith echoes, his head spinning. Isabel leaves.

Keith can’t shake the sudden feeling that he’s done something wrong. He looks back at Lance and struggles for a moment to think fo something to say. An apology, maybe.

“I’m not leaving,” Luis says, too loud, and shoves a sweet cake in his mouth.

“Chew!” Lance pauses in his tapping to all but smack the table, startling everyone except Luis. Sophie huffs again. Luis snatches another cake.

There’s something familiar about the jumbled banter that erupts between the brothers. Keith thinks, just for a moment, that he’s going to fall over, and then Lance squeezes his hand. He looks at Lance and is startled by his smile, his eyes.

“How are you?” Keith asks.

Lance shrugs. “Good.”

Keith half believes him, maybe because it’s half true. He wants to ask—well, he wants to peel away the silence between them. He wants to pull Lance outside and look at him in the sun and the air and admit a thousand failures just to fill the space of a long, cold year. Darker is the urge to steal him away, to lock them together in his tiny, battered apartment.

“Keith,” Lance says.

His heart stutters. “What was all the yelling about?” he asks instead of saying: _I’ve missed you_ , or _I can’t feel my own heart_ , or _I want to run_.

Lance looks—embarrassed. “Oh, you know.”

“…no?”

Lance shrugs and shoves a cake in his mouth. His cheeks bulge and his eyes water. Luis hoots. Maybe on another afternoon it’d all be adorable.

“Lance and Marco were fighting,” Luis says, eagerly filling Keith in on his brother’s behalf. Lance chokes. “Again.”

Keith knows there are a handful of questions he could ask now. He swallows and manages: “Why?”

Luis shifts uncomfortably. “Well, you know.”

“No. I don’t.”

He does. He remembers the woman in the doorway— _Lance’s mother_ , his hair and his eyes and that lift of his eyebrows that’s more warning than confusion—and the young man behind her— _Are you here for my brother?_ He remembers Isabel’s shaking hands.

There’s a tightness in his chest he knows all too well. He starts to pull his hand free of Lance’s. “I—“

“Don’t,” Lance says, so quiet Keith almost thinks he imagines it. Lance squeezes his hand and doesn’t let go. “You just got here.”

“Lance—“

Sophie barks. Lance releases Keith’s hand.

When Keith looks up, he knows exactly who everyone is—like they’ve stepped out of one of Lance’s homesick stories and appeared in a foggy dream. Marco is taller than Lance, and there’s a lot of Isabel in him: lanky limbs and long neck, dark eyes and curly hair. His glasses are noticeably smudged and his hair’s a mess, and he’s glaring at Keith—a proper, fierce glare that reminds Keith too strongly of Lance. Veronica is paler than her brothers, her hair pulled into an explosive ponytail and silver bangles clicking together as he folds her arms. And then Lance’s mother: shorter than her children, bright eyes and short hair.

Keith stands up. “Hello,” he says, awkward and probably too late.

A breath.

“So! You’re Keith!” Veronica’s voice is light and vaguely sing-song. She steps forward and pulls Keith into a hug that he mostly stumbles into. “We’ve heard so much about you.”

“Oh,” Keith manages after mustering up every ounce of eloquence he has.

Veronica steps back and holds him at arms-length. “You must have been traveling for ages.”

“I guess.”

“This is Veronica,” Lance pipes up. He’s leaning against the table, smiling a lazy smile.

There’s a little of the loud teenager Keith first knew—that Lance’s family lost him as—but there’s more of the straight-backed man with his quiet, anxious tells that Keith fell in love with. Keith’s skin burns.

“I know.” He looks back at Veronica. He grimaces. “I’m Keith.”

Veronica’s lips curl into an amused, stifled smile.

“Yeah, we know,” Marco grumbles behind her. He’s hovering, protective and conspicuous. His nose is red and swollen. “What are you doing here?”

“Marco,” Lance’s mother admonishes softly.

Lance starts tapping at the table again.

“Stop hovering!” Isabel returns with a flourish and wave of her hands. “Sit down!”

Veronica releases Keith and tickles Luis until he agrees to share his seat. Marco moves away, too, but stays standing and hovers instead by Lance. Lance ignores him.

“This is my wife, Regina,” Isabel says when neither Keith nor Lance’s mother move. Isabel raises an eyebrow at them, then shrugs and pulls her hair into a ponytail.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Keith says.

Regina considers him, then gives him a small smile. She grasps his hand briefly as she passes, but says nothing as she sits. Sophie leaves Luis, finally, to settle at Regina’s feet.

Keith returns to his seat.

“So? What do you want?” Marco crosses his arms and glowers down at Keith over Lance’s head. He looks almost intimidating. Keith thinks that a year ago he might have been amused by Marco’s bluster, his protective anger. Now, he’s tired.

“Why can’t you just be nice?” Veronica groans. She jingles with every movement. “This is Lance’s space friend—“

“Boyfriend,” Lance corrects. Keith suddenly wants to kiss him. He’d almost forgotten what that feels like.

Veronica waves a hand. “Right, sorry. Space boyfriend—“

“ _Geez_ , Veronica.”

“— _and_ we should all be nice to him so he’ll tell us embarrassing Lance-in-space stories.” Veronica smiles sweetly at Keith. “Right?”

“Uh,” Keith says.

“Tell them nothing!” Lance snatches Keith’s hand with more bodily flair than is strictly necessary and is so much himself that Keith worries he’ll start crying again from the relief of it all. “Except stories of my heroism and charisma. That’s it.”

Luis and Veronica laugh. It isn’t malicious. It sounds suspiciously like effort, like they want him to feel wanted. Isabel shakes her head and ruffles Luis’s hair fondly and even Regina in her silence smiles at her coffee.

Not Marco.

“Stop joking around.” Marco is bright-eyed and angry, sweaty and trembling. He rounds on Keith. “None of this is okay. How did you find us? When is _your_ keeper going to come looking for you? How much trouble are we all in?”

Keith’s stomach drops. The relief vanishes. For a blissful while he had forgotten Clarissa and Tash.

“We’ll figure it out,” Lance says. “Don’t worry.”

Marco blinks at the back of his head. “Seriously?”

“We’ll be fine,” Isabel cuts in. Her tone is too light. “Just sit down, Marco.”

Marco does. His eyes don’t leave Keith. Lance doesn’t let go of his hand. Keith thinks over and over that he shouldn’t have come; that he doesn’t want to be anywhere else; that he’s fucked up.

 

* * *

 

Shiro shouts that Keith is his brother enough times that someone believes him. It helps that no one mentions that Keith isn’t entirely human. Cua, their first keeper, makes sure to tell them what an exception’s been made, warns them not to break the Garrison’s trust in them. Shiro says fear has grown wild they were gone. He keeps a hand on Keith’s shoulder, like he’s afraid Keith will slips away if he looks away or lets go even for a moment. “We stay together,” Shiro insists. “No matter what.”

 

* * *

 

Keith drove. His hands shook. They were letting go, together. He knew Shiro felt it, too: the growing distance, a barrier, a wall.

Seven days. Keith drove until he had to pull over and gasp against the steering wheel until his own grief drowned out Shiro’s.

They were home.

 

 

* * *

 

Keith can’t tell what’s real. He sees colour everywhere, dancing in light and water. He remembers something like this from when it was him and Shiro but it’s more intense now and with Lance. Keith stands in the shower and watches the water spray blue—so, so much blue—against his eyes and skin and wonders if it’s his part of the bond crashing into Lance or if it’s Lance’s reaching out for him, enveloping him.

Lance is waiting for him in his room, sitting cross-legged on his bed. His room screams Lance to Keith: photos and drawing stuck to the walls; dark blue, wrinkled bed sheets; a neat closet ruined by a disorganized pile of shoes and two bent umbrellas. It’s raining but Lance leaves the window open so the sound of it is almost too loud: _patter patter patter_. Keith expects Lance to be listening to it, to be soaking in the rain after so long without it—but Keith remembers too late and too quickly that it has been a year. Lance is, instead, rifling through Keith’s hastily packed bag. Keith finds hims squinting at Keith’s fake passport.

“What are you doing?” Keith asks, hovering in the doorway.

“Snooping,” Lance admits with ease. He tosses the passport to the floor. “Are you coming in?”

Keith grimaces but closes the door behind him. Lance grins.

It is the first time they’ve been alone in a year. Keith half-expects Luis to crawl out of the closet, Sophie following and licking at his ankles.

He sits at the edge of the bed and leans back on his hands.

“It’s a lot, isn’t it?” Lance says. He shuffles closer. “I didn’t…” He trails off and shrugs.

“Yeah,” Keith says. His own voice feels awkward and heavy in his mouth. He’s sweating.

Lance studies him and Keith sees both his mothers in his face and in the twitch of his lips and the quirk of his eyebrows. Abruptly, Lance sighs and throws himself back agains the bed. The mattress bounces slightly. He unfolds his legs and dangles them off the edge of the bed. Keith watches his toes wiggle.

“You’re giving me a headache.” Lance yawns. “At least I’m not crying.”

“Shut up,” Keith mutters.

He lays gingerly next to Lance, trying not to disturb the bed. Lance turns his head to look at him, smiling.

“Hey,” Lance says eventually.

Keith feels them slipping into a pattern. They could reunite at every turn, every time their eyes met.

For a while.

He tries to reach out through the bond but he overcompensates—too used to distance—but Lance doesn’t pull away or flinch. He’s there to catch Keith and draw him in until their colours melt together.

“Hey,” Keith echoes, finally, and Lance’s smile grows. Keith reaches out and Lance’s hand meets him partway. A gap in his heart fills—and overflows.

“I thought you would be with Shiro,” Lance says. Somewhere beyond the closed door Luis laughs, loud and long and happy. “They told us Pidge and Matt, and you and Shiro—“ Lance’s smile has fallen away again.

Keith thinks about telling him, just unloading everything like cluttered baggage because Keith is nothing if he isn’t the _king_ of _baggage_. His fear is strong, however, and it feels a lot like anger.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Keith says and closes his eyes. “Maybe— I mean, we can talk about it—tomorrow.”

Lance makes a thoughtful hum. When Keith opens his eyes again, Lance stares right back at him, steady and blue.

“Tell me about Tash,” Keith says when the quiet drags on. “And Marco.”

Lance’s lips twitch. “Maybe tomorrow,” he replies and some of the strain they won’t put words to leaks into his voice.

Keith huffs a small laugh.

The rain carries on but the heat lingers. Lance rolls onto his side and shuffles closer. They fit back together easily and with Lance’s arm slung over him and Lance’s breath against his neck, Keith finally relaxes. He is slumped uncomfortably and too warm and the rain spatters against his head when the wind blows just so. Lance lets out a long sigh and Keith feels them deflate together and he falls asleep smelling sunlight on sea water. It’s so ridiculous and so extreme he thinks he’ll finally—finally—sleep well.

The last thing he hears is his own voice whispering: “I missed you.”

 

* * *

 

 

Nightmares.

 

* * *

 

The overflowing bathwater caught his attention, splashing against the tiled bathroom floor. Keith rested his book on his knees for a moment, listening. More water hits the floor and it sounded like cartoon thunder.

He unfolded himself from the corner of the couch and tossed his book aside. He tried not to rush. He tried not to panic or remember the heavy bags under his brother’s eyes.

“Shiro?” he called. He hovered at the closed door.

He opened it and stepped into a puddle of lukewarm water. Panic flashed through him, hot and horrified. He darted to the side of the tub, his soaked socks slipped against the tiles.

Shiro: fully-clothed and fully-submerged.

Keith thrust his arms into the water, grasping at his brother’s shoulders. He slipped, his knees cracking against the floor and his chest against the edge of the tub—his shirt sleeves and pant legs soaked.

“ _Shiro!_ ”

Shiro’s hand gripped one of Keith’s wrists briefly, then scrabbled for the edge of the tub. Keith grabbed hold and, wheezing through his panic, hoisted Shiro upright. He seemed to erupt out of the water, dripping and gasping and—and grinning. Keith fell back. His heart pounded in his ears.

“Keith,” Shiro gasped. Water dripped from his nose. “I had an idea.”

“An—what are you talking about?”

“We just need a way to focus,” Shiro says quickly. “I thought— I thought if we could find a quiet place we’d be able to reach the others.”

Keith gaped. Shiro pressed at the edge of his mind, insistent and not quite himself. He was overexcited, Keith decided. His fingers started to feel numb.

The silence stretched on. Shiro’s smile started to fade. The taps dripped.

“I know this looks a little weird,” Shiro said eventually, sounding more uncomfortable now than excited. “It worked, though, Keith. I really think it worked.”

Keith knew Shiro was as desperate for the others as he was. It was overwhelming to have the bond distilled to just them: Shiro’s constant presence did almost nothing to fill in the missing pieces. It had been a long time since Keith had been alone in his own head—maybe it had been even longer for Shiro. They didn’t talk about that, either.

His pants squelched as he stood. “I’ll get the mop,” he said and left the bathroom.

A moment later, he heard a smattering of curses and more sloshing water. _Go back_ , said something insistent in his head. _Go back_.

 

* * *

 

_Hunk had said it, clearly and without embarrassment: “I couldn’t do this alone. I’m glad we’re together. All of us.”_

_Keith had looked up at him to see Hunk smiling._

_“Don’t you think?” Hunk had continued. And then: “I’m always here to talk, buddy. We’re in this together.”_

_“Oh,” Keith had said._

_He remembers laughing, but he can’t remember why._

 

* * *

 

He dreams of the castle-ship. He follows a familiar path and reaches the empty pods—no, not empty. Sealed and fogged over, all seven. Even his own. He brushes condensation from the surface of his and sees Tash staring back at him, frozen and afraid. He turns away and moves in front of Lance’s pod. He’s fast asleep, peaceful. He can’t look for long. Next is Shiro’s but he sees Marco instead, his glasses fogged over and his thin mouth twisted into a grimace. He runs to Hunk’s and tries to beat the pod open but his hands become weathered, claw-like things: leather skin, knives instead of fingers.

“Hunk,” he says. “Wake up.” He tries to summon a shout, a cry, a scream, but nothing comes.

Hunk opens his eyes and presses a hand to the glass.

He whips around and sees Shiro, his arms crossed and his eyes eerily blank.

“Shiro,” Keith breathes. “I’m so sorry.”

Shiro unfolds his arms and peels off his face—a slow gesture, like something thick sliding away—and Clarissa looks back at Keith with her dark eyes and her grim expression.

“Keith,” Hunk calls behind him, too quiet and too far. “Keith—“

Clarissa reaches for him and wraps her long fingers around his throat. He sighs and falls away.

Keith wakes to a soft buzzing coming from beyond Lance’s open window. It’s a bug, he thinks and then corrects himself: many bugs. Post-rain frolicking.

One of them has kicked away the thin blanket Lance had tossed over them. Keith feels sticky where they are tangled together, and Lance’s sleep-heavy breath tickles his ear. He strains to look at the purple sky out the window and tries to guess the time.

He’s tired, but wound tight. He tries to close his eyes and drift back to sleep, safe next to Lance and far away from Clarissa’s haunting menace. On the back of his eyelids Keith sees the old grassy paths he ran by the little house without a dog and the disturbed memories of Shiro is too much. He stays awake, eyes wide open.

He tells himself to stay in bed. A year ago he might have woken Lance, or saved the memory of his nightmare to share with Shiro, or Pidge, or—

Well.

Now, he listens to his own heart beating, however hard he tries to focus on Lance’s breathing instead. Lance is warm. Objectively, he should be comforting: long and perfect and familiar and missed (longed for). Keith wants to wrap himself around Lance, to wake him with clumsy, uncertain kisses and transform his fear and regret in affection. He sits up. Lance rolls away with a grunt.

“Keith?” he mumbles, eyes opening just a fraction.

Keith struggles with what to say. His lips are dry and part with a creak, but no words come. He brushes his fingers over Lance’s forehead instead, just to feel and be felt, and Lance smiles as he drifts back into sleep. How has he been sleeping? Keith is desperate to know, suddenly and fearfully.

He stands and stretches. His bones seem to protest, and angrily. But Lance stays asleep, snoring softly now with his face tilted into the mattress and one arm pressed up against the wall awkwardly. Keith studies him in the darkness for a time and realizes slowly that he’s trying to memorize Lance. Or—trying to update the memories he does have.

There’s a scar around the back of Lance’s squished arm, pale against his skin and almost luminescent in the dark. When Keith had last seen him, it had been a fierce red—an outright wound, immediate and painful but healing.

He thinks about tracing it to its finish by Lance’s shoulder and grows suddenly nauseous.

Keith turns away. He shoves a hand through his hair but it’s unsatisfying: too short, still. He sneaks out of the bedroom, quiet on his bare feet. He steps down the stairs with one hand trailing against the wall, pausing more than he wanted to stare at and study the pictures strung on the wall. He can barely see them in the dark and tries to remind himself to come back when the sun is up and look for hints of a young Lance—to try and recognize Veronica and Marco, and Regina and Isabel.

The kitchen light is on. If he breathes in he can smell a trace of the dinner that had been filled with overcompensating laughter and noise. Luis had asked him too many questions until Lance had threatened to tie him to the tree. Luis had seemed almost tempted, but had backed off all the same.

Keith hadn’t had any answers.

_How many arms did the aliens have?_

_How big is Voltron? Is the Princess pretty?_

_Are you staying with us now?_ ( _No_ , Marco had hissed and been kicked under the table by Veronica.)

Keith hesitates at the base of the stairs, his hand still pressed to the wall. He thinks, with his luck, it will be Marco waiting to ambush him with hostility and accusations. After his fitful sleep, Keith is inclined to—agree with Marco. He can only guess at what the year has been like for Lance and his family. How had the Garrison handled families, bringing (forcing?) paladins with families back home, tearing those families away from their day-to-day? Lance’s siblings and mothers were obviously familiar with tash and her role. It makes Keith worry, and panic, and imagine the worst.

His muscles burn with unused stress, long-term fatigue, and impatience. He peers around the corner and into the kitchen.

Regina blinks at him, her arms folded on the table and a book open in front of her.

Keith thinks about running back upstairs and hiding under Lance.

“Keith?” Regina says softly.

He creeps around the corner but clings to the entryway’s frame. He wonders if he looks fidgety and untrustworthy. He thinks that this is maybe the third thing Regina has willingly said to him.

Maybe it’s the first.

“Can’t sleep?” Regina speaks just above a whisper, and the curl of her lips is just about a smile. She gestures to at the corner next to her. “Come sit.”

Keith thinks, again, about running. Then he thinks about squaring his shoulders and making a good impression for Lance’s mother. He all but slouches to the seat and sits gingerly, so obviously nervous he wants to scream at himself.

He doesn’t say anything. Words are gone again.

“Lance thought you might be with your brother,” Regina says when Keith stays quiet. She reaches for an open wrapper of thick, black chocolate and pulls it between them. “I would have liked to meet him. We read a lot about him, before— Well, before the Kerberos mission.” She pauses and seems suddenly uncertain. “Also...after.” She breaks off a piece of the chocolate and nibbles at it.

“Lance was a big fan of Shiro’s,” Keith says and immediately wants to punch himself in the face.

Regina squints at him. “Chocolate?” she offers.

“I’m good,” Keith says, like it’s becoming his catchphrase.

“Take some chocolate.” Regina nudges the wrapper towards him.

Keith doesn’t move. He feels a little childish but also a little—deliberate? He thinks about Lance, fast asleep and uncomfortably scrunched, and he wonders if his mother knows where his scars end. “I’m good,” he says again. He pauses. “Thank you.”

Shiro would be proud.

Regina nibbles at the chocolate in her hand until it’s gone, not even a slightly melted smear of it on her fingers. Keith remembers her and Marco in the doorway, memories of their concerned faces peeking through the blue that had exploded over his eyes.

“Do you know where he is now?”

It takes him too long to remember that they are talking about Shiro. “No,” he admits. Another pause. “I left.”

Regina breaks off another corner of the chocolate and holds it delicately between her fingers. He thinks, with something like relief, that her hands look nothing like Lance’s or Veronica’s: they are small, freckled, just some shine to hint at polish, one ring on her right hand and one on her left.

( _“He was a musician,” Keith remembers Lance saying as they lie side-by-side, watching the unmoving waters of the pool overhead. “Violin.”_

_He had sounded almost embarrassed, almost wistful._

_“Maybe I wanted Marco to replace him,” Lance had mused, but Keith remembers only silence after that._ )

“Why?” Regina asks.

“I couldn’t—stay.” Keith feels himself slump just slightly, like he;’s remembered something heavy is sitting on his head. In the quiet that follows, he can hear a clock ticking.

“I buried him,” Regina says. She sets the chocolate back down. She isn’t looking at Keith, just staring at her open book. “What I had of him, anyways.That doesn’t mean I let go. I Just stopped hoping. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t talk to us,” she continues. Keith’s jaw clenches. “He tells us stories and laughs off the scars, but he doesn’t _talk_ to us. I know he has nightmares and I know he—you—fought an entire war in places I can’t even imagine. Tash suggested he talk to someone, but…”

“Yeah,” Keith says. His mouth is dry. He swallows. “They said something similar to us, too. Shiro—“ His mouth snaps shut, his teeth clicking. He grips his knees. He looks at the tabletop, tracing the swirls and marks of the wood.

“Talk to him,” Regina says, almost too quiet for Keith to hear. “Until you can’t stay anymore. Please.”

She barely knows him. She wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a crowd. All the same, she knows this and it leaves Keith feeling exposed.

“He missed you every day,” he hears himself say.

“Marco never stopped hoping,” Regina says. “He waited for his brother.”

( _“I’ve met Marco,” Hunk says and his laughter echoes wonderfully in the memory. “They’re so— You’d never be able to tell they weren’t_ always _brothers, you know?” He pauses and look sat Keith, who chooses not to remember him say: “Kind of like you and Shiro.”_ )

Keith wants to say: _I’m not going anywhere_.

“My brother isn’t waiting for me,” he says instead.

“I think my son was,” Regina says. “What do you think, Keith?”

Keith hears: _why are you here_ and _what do you want_? A rational slice of brain scoffs and reminds him that she’s reaching for Lance, just like he is. Everyone, walking around each other and calling out in the wrong direction. He looks up and she blinks at him. Her mouth twitches.

“I don’t know,” he says.

They look at each other for a long time.

“What was it like?” she asks, and points towards the ceiling.

“It wasn’t all bad.” Keith shifts in his seat, uncomfortable. “A lot of it was good. We were a team.”

Regina re-wraps her chocolate and closes the book. She stands and clutches it to her chest and looks down at Keith. “You look ready to run,” she says and Keith knows by her tone and her light, tinkling laughter that Regina is teasing him.

He gives her a twitchy, small smile of his own. His heart thuds painfully and every inch of him is screaming. She doesn’t know him.

She goes back to bed, she says.

Home, the others had said.

Home, Keith had thought when he listened to their laughter, their tears, their voices.

Shiro hovered in his bedroom door, groggy-eyed and frowning. “We could talk,” he said. “We should talk. We can’t do this alone, Keith.”

“Do what?” Keith shoved his hands through his hair (too long, too heavy). He stared at his feet, at his runners already worn and his legs already trembling. “What are we doing?”

Shiro sighed. “Continuing,” he said.

Another time, another life, Keith thought Shiro might have sat next to him and held his hand and made promises about a looming finish line.

“We’ll talk in the morning,” Shiro said instead. “Try and get some sleep.” He closed the door, a point made, and Keith listened to his footsteps down the hall. Another door closed.

He packed a bag and he left that night and he drove until he couldn’t bear it any longer and screamed against the steering wheel until all he could hear was the ringing in his own ears and all he could feel was the burn in his chest.

Lance finds him in the kitchen hours later. Or, stumbles on him. He and Marco are in the middle of a rapid-fire argument that Keith can’t understand, but they haven’t devolved into tepid wrestling. Keith doesn’t want to see that, even if Veronica promises it’s some kind of entertaining.

Lance, Keith knows, could snap his brother in half. Everyone else must know, too. Maybe that’s something they don’t talk about.

“Good morning, Keith,” Veronica says, loud and pointed and rolls her eyes at the brothers. “How’d you sleep?”

“Fine,” Keith replies automatically.

Lance eyes him. Then, he grins and joins Keith at the table. Keith hasn’t moved in hours. He watches Lance struggle with something to say and wishes that he could melt into the chair.

“Decided what you’re doing, yet?” Marco grumbles and crumples into a chair on the other side of the table. He manages to sit only for a moment before he’s up again, pacing around the kitchen.

Veronica heaves an enormous sigh and inspects the coffee maker before shrugging and digging out the box of pastries. “Leave him alone, Marco.”

“It’s too early for this,” Lance groans.

“Too early for what?” Marco pauses in his pacing just long enough to shoot each of his siblings a glare. “For worrying about our _lives_? Our _stability_?” He shoves his glasses further up his nose, obviously flustered and pacing again.

Keith, wisely, keeps his mouth shut.

“Did you sleep okay?” Veronica asks and lounges against the counter. She takes her time to pick out a pastry.

“No!” Marco throws his hands into the air for emphasis, which Keith finds more than a little alarming. “I was worried! Someone has to be!”

“About what?”

“Don’t get him started,” Lance groans. He winks at Keith. Keith wishes he wouldn’t.

“Oh boy,” Veronica says and shoves the pastry in her mouth. Crumbs line her lips.

Marco pauses again, apparently to look disgusted. Veronica grins around her food.

“Seriously?”

She shrugs.

Marco rounds on Keith and Lance, then. Keith lays his hands flat on the table and stares right back, his spine rigid.

“They separated you for a reason,” Marco says. “They’re going to be pissed.”

“They were scared,” Veronica says. She still looks loose and casual as she eyes the rest of the pastries, but her voice is tense and sharp. Keith thinks he’s learning too much about the arguments from the day before. “We don’t give in to fear, remember?”

“Except we did,” Marco snaps. “We take their money and we took Lance back and we let them be afraid. And that’s okay!”

“How is that okay?”

Veronica lifts her eyes to look at Keith. Lance sets a hand on his knee, squeezing gently.

But he’s burning, flushed even more than Marco.

“They were scared of what we _did_ ,” Keith says. “They separated us because they wanted to stay scared. Some explorers! We did more in that time—“

“Years,” Marco cuts in. Behind him, Veronica eyes drop away again.

Keith swallows his voice.

“Years,” Marco repeats. “You and my brother and your friends vanished fir years. Regina was convinced Lance was gone. We waited, and searched, and— Well.” He crosses his arms and huff out a tired laugh. “I know _you_ think we ought to be really darn grateful and all for the saving you and Voltorb—“

“Voltron,” Veronica corrects, quiet and flat.

“Yeah, see. I don’t really care.”

“Marco,” Lance says. A warning, low and unimpressed.

Keith doesn’t want to hear that voice in this colourful kitchen. He imagines asphalt under his feet, wind over his ears, burning in his lungs. Half of him is angry, and it’s a hot and undignified and offended kind of anger—but the other half of him is shrinking, pulling away and dragging every bit of Keith that it can reach with it.

“Your war’s over,” Marco says, almost yells. “Just let it go.”

Lance stands, abrupt and lightning-quick. He and Marco glare at each other. Keith and Veronica are caught as uncomfortable outsiders.

“Stop fighting!” Luis shrieks from the stairs. Sophie barks.

Keith’s shirt clings to his back, sweat-soaked and heavy.

And then Lance turns slowly to look at him and smiles. “I’ll show you around,” he says. He holds out his hand.

* * *

 

Keith met Clarissa and they bashed heads immediately.

“I’m sure you’re very brave,” she told him, surveying his empty apartment with distaste, irritation, derision. “I’m sure your war made you very strong.”

“Don’t joke,” Keith spat, glaring up at her. He had set himself on the floor in what he could only call an act of childish rebellion. _This is mine_ , he thought he was screaming. _This is my life_. “I know the party line.”

Clarissa turned her bright eyes on him. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Keith.”

She might as well have slapped him.

“Isn’t that reassuring.”

“I know it isn’t.” She paused. She pressed her lips into a thin line. “You’re not at war anymore, Keith. Part of my job is convincing you of that.”

“I know the war’s over!” He threw back his head and laughed. “I was there when it ended!”

She made many promises that first meeting: he’d never see Cua again, he’d be comfortable in his new life, she’d be with him every step of the way, she’d make sure he’d be convinced in a matter of months.

Seventy-four days. He didn’t know what Lance smelled like anymore. He was horrified, embarrassed, and felt pieces of him chipping away with every step he took. It seemed too obvious that his wasn’t a problem he could beat into submission.

No—this was a problem that was beating him, day by day. Maybe he had used up all his fight in bringing down the Galra Empire.

He tried to say it out loud once Clarissa was gone, but the words were too alien and too ridiculous. It felt like a fantasy, even to him.

 _I don’t think you’re crazy, Keith_.

So goddamn generous. All the evidence was there, though, wasn’t it?

He shaved his head. Badly. He laughed at his reflection.

He lasted one more meeting with Clarissa and remembered Shiro in the bathtub. There was something about patience, and focus, and water, and sound.

“Jumbled,” he muttered to the mirror and ran a hand over his hair.

He crawled into the shower and ran the water and closed his eyes and didn’t cry when he got a whiff of Lance, a brush of Pidge, a whisper of Hunk, and the distant, steady beat of Shiro and Allura.

That was the ninetieth day and a turning point.

* * *

 

They don’t go anywhere.

Luis bursts into every room they wander into. He climbs all over Lance and tells bad jokes ( _what did the fly say when he hit the windshield?_ ) and cons Keith into playing ball with him and Sophie. Veronica pulls him aside in the early afternoon to flip through photos and, surprisingly, both Lance and Marco wail at her. She ignores them.

Isabel makes him eat until he can’t breathe, and Regina pulls him aside to whisper that he did _not_ see her with the chocolate (Luis and Lance seem to be on to her; Keith doesn’t ask).

Every time Marco seems ready to pick a fight, Lance intervenes, though the brothers spring apart when they seem to be coming close to an argument. Marco, to Keith, seems scared: twitchy and wide-eyed and dozing off in the corner—only to wake suddenly and look for Lance.

Lance—hovers. He is everywhere, though he never really seems to be looking at Keith. Keith thinks about lying side-by-side in Lance’s bed, just looking at each other, and then about Lance burying himself against him. As the day goes on, it seems more and more like Lance is talking around him than to him. Keith is slow to figure Lance out. It hits him late that Lane isn’t so much ignoring him as he is giving attention to his family. Keith is present, but not distracting. He wonders if that’s true. He wonders if he wants to be true.

“Play something for us, Marco,” Regina says in the humid evening. She is curled into the couch amongst its mass of quilts and pillows. Veronica sets on the floor, her head resting near her mother’s knee and her phone bright in her hands.

Luis leaps up from the floor, the pages of his comic fluttering as he waves it. “Yeah! Come on, Marco!”

Marco is quiet, looking from his step-mother to his brother. Isabel comes up behind and pokes him in the side. He shrugs away from her, scowling.

“No!” He sidles up against the wall and crosses his arms. “I’m not in the mood.”

“You’re always in the mood,” Veronica mutters. Marco glares at her.

Keith hovers uncertainly by the large window, distracted now from watching the wind in the curtains and the shifting seas that is simultaneously close and far away. Lance is in a chair near his elbow, curled in tight and with his head leaning back. He looks like he’ll fall asleep at any moment, with his eyes half-closed and a small smile tugging at his lips.

“Come on,” Lance chimes in. He stretches his arms over his head and yawns. “You can show off a bit.”

Marco’s eyes dart to Keith. Keith tries not to take it as a challenge.

“Regina asked nicely,” Isabel adds. She steps around Luis, who is excitedly giving Marco two thumbs up. Regina shifts just enough that Isabel can join her, pressed close against her side.

“Did I?” Regina says and slips an arm around Isabel.

Marco huffs and pushes off the wall again. He disappears around the corner and Keith hears his footsteps on the stairs.

He looks questioningly at Lance, who winks.

“My brother plays like an angel,” he tells Keith.

“A wailing angel,” Veronica amends affectionately.

Lance grins.

Marco returns with his dark brown violin tucked under his arm and his bow held delicately in his right hand. Lance straightens in his seat. The whole family seems to settle: Veronica sets aside her phone; Luis worms his way between his mothers.

Marco begins without preamble, just a breath. The melody is high and sweet, slipping delicately under Keith’s skin and making goosebumps rise on his arms. It drifts between rapid like a heartbeat, then smooth like a lullaby. There’s something sad about it, but Keith has a hard time following the mournful strain of the music as it flits from note to note. Marco’s bow moves with a fluid elegance that reminds him of Lance—or, of the first time he saw Lance settle into his own skin and raise his bayard with confidence. Marco is no longer the awkward, angry boy Keith has known up until now: he’s music, flowing from the strings and making the air vibrate.

He finishes abruptly and it’s shocking; Keith feels jerked from a dream.

Luis groans and tosses his head back, earning a squawk from Isabel.

Marco lowers his bow and scowls again. “It’s not done yet,” he admits in a mutter.

“You’ve come really far,” Veronica offers gently. “It sounds more amazing every time you play it, Marco.”

Marco seems uncomfortable under the praise, dancing his fingers along the fingerboard with a furrowed brow.

“I’ll play something else,” he says, just as Keith realizes that Marco had written the first piece.

Lance touches his hand, featherlight. “Come on,” he whispers to Keith and pulls himself from his seat. They drift out of the living room just as Marco begins to play again, something faster and less haunting but Keith’s ears strain to listen all the same.

Lance leads him down the dark hall and out a side door, bare foot and unconcerned.

“I didn’t know your brother wrote music,” Keith says when he can barely hear Marco’s playing over the dull crashing and sighing of the ocean.

“I didn’t know either,” Lance replies without turning around. “He started after we left.”

That silences Keith again. He shoves his hands in his pockets and watches Lance’s back as they walk. They skid down a bank together, automatically reaching out to steady one another though they both pull away when their fingers touch.

Keith can’t bring himself to break the silence so he walks with a clenched jaw and tense hands. His toes dig into the still warm sand.

The setting sun has left streaks of purple and dark blue over everything.

The water stretches on forever.

It’s silent, save for the sea.

Lance stops and Keith steps to his side. They don’t look at each other.

“I wanted to bring you here,” Lance says, awkward and slow. He scratches at his neck—a nervous gesture developed _over days in silence, hiding and waiting for their chance in the dark, just a chance_. “I wanted to talk.”

Keith’s toes curl. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They stand side-by-side and watch the water. It reminds keith of the desert, stretching on and shifting with every blink and breath. At the same time—it reminds him of nothing but itself, and he tries to remember the last time he was near this much water.

The day has shaken him, he thinks. He has spent almost a year in silence, and there’s—this. Somehow, this is the proof he needs to believe that life continues after war—that life _can_ continue. He wonders what the rest of their days could look like: Luis growing up surrounded by love and laughter and music; Lance, cradled safe in his family’s affection and loyalty; the bags slowly fading from under Regina and Isabel’s eyes.

He tilts his head just enough that he can steal a peak of Lance, silent and steady next to him.

“Tell me what happened with Shiro,” Lance says then, and something cold runs through Keith.

“There’s nothing to tell,” he snaps, and flinches.

Lance just shrugs. “Fine. Don’t tell me.” He sinks to the sand with a sigh, stretching out his legs and burying his hands in the sand.

Keith hesitates, then kneels next to him. He feels shaky and shaken, outraged and horrified. He stares at his own knees. “I remember,” he says, and chokes on the words. He shakes his head. “All the damn time, Lance, I remember. I want to stop.”

“Why?” An accusation rings in Lance’s voice, harsh. Keith draws back. “I remember too, Keith. It’s not like you went through it all by yourself. We were all there.”

“And where are _we_ now?” Keith stands again and shoves his hands back in his pockets to hide the shaking. “There’s no _we_ now, Lance. Coming home made sure of that.”

Lance is quiet for so long Keith is half-convinced he’s left.

“Why did you come here?” he asks eventually.

When Keith turns around, Lance is still sitting in the sand, his hands buried and his eyes trained on Keith. He’s stretched his long legs out, still close enough that if Keith crouch down again he could grab Lance’s ankles and pull him close. Keith turns back to the sea.

“You apparently bamboozled Tash into showing up at my door with plane tickets,” he muttered.

“Bamboozled!” Lance laughs and it seems to echo around Keith, drowning out the sea. Something similar happens in the bond between them, so it quivers and Lance’s blue seems to dance around Keith’s dark red. “I’m an excellent bamboozler.”

Keith doesn’t reply.

“Do I really need to tell you that that is _one hundred percent_ not what I asked?”

“What do you want, Lance?”

“I want to know what you want.”

He could run, barefoot and shrieking, and never look back. He knows what it would be like, to run until he couldn’t feel Lance anymore, until the loss of him made his bones splinter and his eyes bleed. He knows it wouldn’t take much—just a split-second’s thought and a leap and he would be gone.

Keith sits in the sand and drapes his arms over his knees and tries to remember what _casual_ felt like.

Lance sighs. “I know you wanted to see me.”

Keith jerks. His fingers twitch. “Of course I did.”

“I wanted to see you, too.” A pause. “That’s what I told Tash.”

“That’s all it took?”

“Yeah. Once a week for, I don’t know, six months?”

Keith watches the water and frowns. “Once a week.”

“Yup.”

“Seeing Clarissa every two weeks feels like a lot,” Keith says over his shoulder. “She says it’s a lot.”

“Maybe it is, for one person. My whole family is stuck with me, remember?”

“Lance—“

“Marco had a great spot in Toronto, my mom says. People wanted him to come and play for them all over the world. He got the call and flew down and—“ Lance breaks off. He sighs again. “Veronica barely speaks to her boyfriend. I think they were going to get married. And Luis— That drives my mom and Isabel crazy, I know it does. It drives me crazy. He should be out making friends and being a kid and learning stuff and he’s trapped in the house with two moms with cabin fever, one brother with rage issues, one sarcastic sister, and—me.”

Keith turns in the sand, his hands falling to his sides with palms up. Lance isn’t looking at him. He stares straight up with his hands still buried in the sand. Keith remembers Regina in the early morning, in the post-rain quiet.

“He barely knew me,” Lance says. “And then his whole life was uprooted because I wanted to go home.”

“We all wanted to go home.”

“Maybe.” Lance falls back. His legs flop and his hands come bursting out in a shower of a sand. “Do you feel like we should have known?”

“…known what?”

Lance waves a sand-encrusted hand.

“That they’d be scared. Of us. And that they’d separate us and we—we’d let them.”

“How could we have known that?”

“I don’t know. It feels like we should have.”

Looking at him now, Keith tries to remember a younger Lance: sleep-deprived and energetic; loud and so present he filled a room all on his own. Keith sees only fragments.

“I thought if we were just, you know, together, everything would fix itself,” Lance continues in a mutter so Keith has to strain to hear him.

He imagines stretching across the sand and laying his head against Lance’s leg but he’s paralyzed again, trapped in the stillness of his own body. There was a time when his stillness was peaceful, powerful—proof of his own capabilities and his own growth. Now it is something else with a too-familiar name and a haunted stranger staring back at him in the mirror.

Things catch up, eventually.

“Maybe there’s nothing to fix.”

Lance leans up on his elbows and quirks an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

Caught, Keith just shrugs.

Lance sighs and seems to sag. “I told her that we were family.” He frowns. “I said that a lot, actually. I think Tash was just the first one to actually listen. Anyways—I told her it would mean freaking _everything_ if we could just be in the same room again. And what was _I_ gonna do, I asked her. Leave my family again after everything?”

“So she brought me to you.”

Lance throws his head back and laughs a short, harsh laugh. “You brought your own damn self. She just opened the door or whatever. And now you’re here and freaking my whole family out—wait, no, not Luis and not, you know, Sophie. Whatever.” He pauses, and then adds softly, almost like he’s embarrassed: “This wasn’t how I imagined you would meet my family.”

“Barging through the front door and crying?”

“Yeah, that.” He wipes his hands against his shorts idly.

Keith wishes he would laugh, or make fun of him, or get mad.

“I thought: home is home. I thought everything would just sort of fall into place as soon as I was in the right place with the right people and _that’s_ what peacetime would be.” He falls back again with a groan and a subdued flop of his legs. “That didn’t happen.”

“They think we’re broken,” Keith hears himself say through gritted teeth. He isn’t even sure which _they_ he’s thinking of, but he’s barreling on, unsure and clumsy. “That we need—need— _fixing_.”

“We _are_ broken. We were fighting a space-war for years. In space. In lions. We saw a whole pile of crazy crap, and then we echoed that around in a mystical space-lion bond.”

Something twists, angry and sharp, along Keith’s ribs. He turns his head to look out over the water again, but Lance draws his eyes back. “Maybe,” Keith says when he can’t think of anything better.

“Not maybe.” Lance sits up again—or, throws himself upright so he wobbles like an off-balance toy. He raps a sandy fist against the side of his head. “We’re connected, remember? You get my crap and I get yours and that’s that.”

Keith’s mouth twists. Automatically, he reaches for Lance again but they’re still swarming around each other, filling in each other’s gasps and—yes, sharing. When he was alone, desperately reaching out, all he heard was his own voice and faint whispers from the others. Now, he feels Lance bouncing about inside him and he hears his own baggage dropping like stones into Lance. It is the purest sort of truth that Keith can think of and he knows that this, now, with Lance, is better than with Shiro’s warm but suffocating presence. Fear and want have him building walls in the sand all the same, but Lance is flowing and washing them all away without even trying. Why bother talking when this silence could be filled easily be exactly this, with or without the others?

He knows why. He knows Lance knows why.

He wonders what they would have been like without the bond, without Voltron, without the war and its princess and its shine and its horror.

He feels Lance and no one else. He can’t even try to reach for the others. Lance is water. Lance is the limitless, giving sea with all its depth and its beauties and its unknown monsters. Keith would drown in him, just by searching and swimming, and thinks that that would be alright: to breathe Lance in and become part of those depths, so blue they’re black. Water is life-giving. Water is beautiful. Lance could fill him—yes, fill him, not drown him—

But Keith is fire and fire consumes. Fire brings its own blackness by casting shadows as it grows and takes.

“We’re going to drive each other crazy,” Lance says, his shoulders slumped and his eyes shining. “And that sucks.”

Keith’s heart pounds. He’s melted to the Earth, waiting for the waves to seize him and drag him away. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.” Lance is less sweet softness and more simmering outrage, dragging his fingers through the sand. “I came here just to hear you. And the others. The waters helps me focus. It drowns everything else out.”

Keith scratches at his palms. He wants to laugh. “I know,” he admits. “Shiro figured it out.”

The watch each other, the dropped name a ticking bomb between them.

“Keith,” Lance says and he sounds a little left of broken. “You left.”

“I ran,” Keith corrects. He closes his eyes and sucks a long breath in. “I ran.”

“Okay.”

Lance’s voice, understanding and warm to Keith’s ears and heart, is a breaking point.

Sudden and hot, Keith’s anger flings him to his feet. “I ran! That’s what I do, Lance. I run away.” He can hear his voice getting louder as he speaks and it’s alien and far away. He sounds angry. He sounds alarmed and loud and angry. He shoves his hands in his pockets and he shakes, sweating in the wind and the smell of the sea.

“Keith.”

He hunches his shoulders and shakes his head. He doesn’t want to be yelling, not now and not at Lance.

“It’s a lot,” Lance says. “Even right now, even just with us, it’s intense.”

“Stop it.”

“Stop _what_? Understanding?”

“Yes!”

“Keith— Jesus. Just, look at me, would you?”

Keith turns automatically, his torso twisting and his ears ringing, and he watches Lance scramble to his feet. He can’t look for long and spins away, his mind racing and his teeth grinding together and his feet digging into the sand.

“Okay,” Lance says, slow and irritated. “You ran. I get it.”

“You really don’t.”

“I get some of it! Right here, with us—come on Keith, I get a little bit of it. Meet me part way.” His hand is at Keith’s elbow, light and warm.

Keith jerks away, hunches his shoulders, scowls at the sand. “Don’t,” he snaps.

“Keith,” Lance starts and he’s too close, too loud—

“ _Don’t_.”

Keith pulls away again, his fists tugged out of the safety of his pockets and his arms spread like surrender, or challenge, or fright. Looking at Lance is bad but part of him can’t help it: he’s here in dying sunlight, looking handsome and touchable and like everything Keith has missed. More than that, Lance looks like fear, and remembering, and love.

It’s too much. Keith’s eyes feel like they’re bulging and preparing to leak from their sockets.

“Don’t you get it?” he says.

Lance groans. His palms face the sky in a gesture that is unfamiliar and surrendering. Keith hates it. It makes him run hot and horrified.

“Come on, Keith.”

“Come on _what_?” He crosses his arms tight against his chest, trying to fight the way he is trembling. “I ran, Lance! I’m going to run again!”

“Then run!”

They stare at each other. Keith’s breaths seem to heave uselessly in his lungs. He opens his mouth, closes it. He takes another step back and shakes his head. “You aren’t hearing me.”

“I am! I really, _really_ am.” Lance is beseeching now, desperate and a little high-pitched. His open hands are still face up and he reaches now for Keith. He takes a hesitant step forward. “Stay put for, like, a minute and just listen, okay?”

Keith wants to look away but can’t. “Okay,” he manages out.

Lance relaxes, just slightly. He takes another half-step closer, just a shuffle in the shifting sand. “It’s okay that you want to run. I want to run, too. Everything’s loud and stuck in my head and I keep looking for you and for Hunk and—“ Lance cuts himself off with a grimace and quick shake of his head. “I’m not saying forever or anything, but maybe…now isn’t the time.”

“For what?” Keith asks, his tongue heavy.

“To be here,” he says eventually and shrugs. “I thought most of this up this morning so, sorry, if it’s not totally clear but also—just listen.”

There’s a twinge in Keith’s chest. Oh, he thinks. He waits for relief to come but all he feels is an ache, sad and afraid. He’s been caught in a whirlwind.

“I’m listening,” Keith grumbles.

“I guess I’m saying you can go ahead and run.”

Yes, _oh_. He should be relieved. His anger is mostly gone now, washed away. He’s left with an aching emptiness instead that he wishes he could cut away, or fill with sand and forget.

“Okay,” Keith says. Then, steadier: “Okay.”

Lance watches him.

“Okay,” Keith says again, his voice growing stronger even as his heart shrivels. “Then I’m going to run.”

Lance gives him a small half-smile. “Then I’m going to chase you.”

Keith balks. “What?”

“You aren’t listening!” Another step and Lance is right in front of him, looking like laughter and tears, rain in sunlight.

“What the fuck,” Keith gasps out.

Lance laughs, quiet and quick. His fingertips brush Keith’s cheeks. He’s close enough that Keith can see the tremble of his lips and the moment his smile plummets out of sight. Lance presses their foreheads together. His fingers trace trace the line of Keith’s jaw, the shape of his ears. His eyes shut and he breathes out a long, slow, unsteady sigh.

Keith forgets to breathe, forgets to run. “You can’t,” he says.

“I can’t stay,” Lance mutters. His brow furrows. “I should have come for you. I didn’t even look—“

“No—“ Keith chokes out, interrupting.

“A year,” Lance continues. “A whole freaking year, Keith.”

Keith sets his unsteady, uncertain hands on Lance’s hips, feeling him under his palms and the fabric of his shirt against his fingertips. He swallows.

All he can see is Lance.

“It’s okay,” Lance says and it’s a soft promise. “We’ll fix this. We’ll fix everything.”

Keith thinks: _I want to hide in you_. Their noses brush.

He kisses Lance before he can think better of it and something slots into place in his chest. The bond vibrates between them and his heart pounds.

Keith thinks: _reunion_ ; and _this what it feels like_ ; and _I remember everything_.

“I love you,” he says against Lance’s lips. “I love you.”

Lance hushes him and they fall into each other and a year, suddenly, seems like nothing at all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was originally the entire fic and written from lance's pov, hence why it took so long and IS so long.
> 
> two more chapters and an epilogue. it's still sentimental.
> 
> Chapter title from Fleet Fox's "On Another Ocean."

**Author's Note:**

> it's supposed to be seven chapters and i'll have the next one up sometime next week
> 
> Thank you for reading. I love feedback, if you have it.


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